Jill FurmanovskyGiven Chrissie Hynde‘s history, you’d think she’d be pretty familiar with The Kinks’ catalog: After all, she recorded the group’s songs “Stop Your Sobbing” and “I Got to Sleep” with The Pretenders, and she also had a daughter with Kinks frontman Ray Davies. But Hynde tells Billboard that she “wasn’t really familiar” with the Kinks song she recorded for her new solo album, Valve Bone Woe.
The song, “No Return,” originally appeared on the Kinks’ 1967 album Something Else By the Kinks. Hynde says her producer Marius de Vries chose the song for her to record for Valve Bone Woe, and made the arrangement sound even more Brazilian than the original.
“It sounds like Ray Davies’ attempt — more than an attempt, it was a successful venture — to do something along those lines,” Hynde tells Billboard. “I’ve been wanting to do stuff that’s more Brazilian and some of that bled into this album.”
As for whether she’s shared her version with Davies, Hynde says, “It never occurred to me,” and added, “I can only imagine any songwriter’s happy when someone covers their song — why shouldn’t they be? Even if it’s bad, they’re still covering your song.”
Valve Bone Woe, which features Hynde covering an eclectic collection of tunes in a jazz style, comes out September 6. Meanwhile, she’s got a new Pretenders album coming out in 2020.
“It’s very, very Pretenders,” Hynde tells Billboard. “It’s got a very wide-ranging mix of songs.” Among them: a song that “sort of sounds like The Specials,” a song that’s like a “Lou Rawls ballad” and “some Gary Glitter-esque kind of rockers.”
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